St. Zita's Project

A few weeks ago, my room mate Bernadette asked me if I wanted to go on retreat with her. The Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist have very successful discernment retreats a few times a year. Retreats "throw off my groove," which is probably the point. I don't like strangers, I don't like big groups of people, I don't like being away from home. But when Bernadette asked if I wanted to go, I said yes. I made myself do it, because I wanted to say no. It was a deny-yourself-take-up-your-cross-and-follow moment.

So I found myself on this retreat. I just prayed that I would be open and not over think things.
Some things helped; like the impressive spiritual maturity of the other young women. I say women, but most of them were girls; young teens who behaved like women. They were all their to pray. That was really a blessing because I didn't want to talk with any of them. I was there to pray.
Bernadette, however, was also a blessing because we could just be friends all weekend in that delightful open way that does not distract from our deepening friendship with Christ. Also, Martha, the younger sister of my friend Paul was there, and for some reason that was special. I tend to adopt my friend's families very readily.

One of the first things that happened was that the Sister at the door asked me if I wanted to "talk to Sister Joseph Andrews." Just the threat of having to talk kept me focused. I had a list in my journal of questions I wanted to ask her about religious life, vocation discernment, and her order specifically. I wanted to play along. I figured, if I felt a call to religious life, these are the questions I would have. I just prayed for the grace to understand what God wants from me. And I entertained the idea that this order might be it

I had a peaceful, prayerful, sleep deprived weekend, but I didn't walk away with an answer. I was waiting for God to say "I'm sending you a man" or "marry me!"

Not getting an answer of that kind was alright with me. It would be too easy and fast for God to just hand me the answer in one weekend. I hadn't earned it with years of fervent prayer. So I left with the resolution to pray more deeply, more fervently before the Blessed Sacrament. Maybe if I dig deep enough in a prayer life, awakening these parts of my heart that have lain dormant in apathy, God will bring to light a passionate, burning desire to be His spouse, or to be a biological mother.

Do you see how this works? I keep pretending, or trying to produce that feeling of being called.

This morning God told me that I'm not called. Not to marriage and not to religious life. Not now, maybe not ever.

When I got home, Liz handed me a paper that someone had given her on the single life as a vocation. I took it rather grudgingly. The first part was all about loneliness.
I've always assumed that the single life was a transition vocations. My vocation right now is to be single. But eventually, God will let me know what he really wants for me. I'll get my real call when I am ready for it.
The other thing about the single life is that it is such a secular American ideal. You are free to do many things that are impossible when you have a family.  You put together your life style just the way you want it, like a facebook page. This has always been attractive to me. But I recognize it as a temptation. It's just selfishness. There is no one to serve, no one to sacrifice for, no "till death" vow of self giving, no mother superior to obey. Whose feet will I wash?

So I didn't really want to read it. But I said yes to that by putting it in my back pack and pulling it out during lunch. One phrase caught my eye:

"For whose salvation will you walk alone."

I may not be any more lonely than the average woman, but I do have to recognize that living alone is a cross. Not having those burdensome people to sacrifice for is actually a challenge and a suffering.
I read a little here and there until nearly the last page. "The Jubilee Day for Single Persons" said the top of the page. I mentally rolled my eyes at it. Is this another form of Single Awareness Day, or Loneliness Awareness Day, or Chocolate Appreciation Day, or all those other things people who don't have dates call Valentines Day.
But in the bottom right corner there was a thick black line with the words


"St. Zita - April 27"    

St. Zita was single!

I knew that. She's not a religious. She's not married. She was a servant for a family basically her whole life. She never left the world, she never married and raised a family. She had a vocation to single life.

I can be a saint without a vocation to marriage or religious life!

I read that page. It pretty much described the kind of holy lifestyle I would like to live. I never felt a call because Christ wasn't calling me to be a nun or a wife. What I do have a desire for is to dedicate my life to art. To translate the beauty of God's truth into music and art and especially stories. To reach people the way my heroes  Brian Jacques, Lloyd Alexander, Rosemary Sutcliff, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien do. I have always been frustrated because the married life lived well doesn't allow that. And very few orders that I know of allow for that. But that is my desire and the way I long to serve God and others.
St. Zita was a blessing and a gift to everyone around her, and she didn't belong to any of them; not to an order, not to her family, not to the people she worked for, just to God.

There is real sacrifice, and real service, and real holiness in this vocation. It was a great relief to know that I didn't have to worry any more. I don't have to look for men, and I don't have to research religious communities. If God does want this to be a transition, he will drop something in my lap and give me the grace to say yes. But I have already said yes and am living a vocation that has everything I have ever wanted or needed to bring me to heaven.

Beloved strangers

Books (good books) are kept alive by readers, but authors die.

Brian Jacques died on Saturday and I (who found out on Tuesday) haven't been able to get him out of my head since I was talking about Redwall with a friend on Sunday. This grief I find at the death of a man I didn't even know... I have been trying all day to find a way to explain it.

It happened when Lloyd Alexander died. When Alexander died, I wrote in my journal for psychology class that I was illogically sad, since the characters I loved were still alive and well. My teacher wrote back that the man himself was a role model through the characters he created and that I had a right to grieve. That is true, I suppose.

But as I think about Mr. Jacques now, I think it was more than his characters. He is also the first in a long line of authors who taught me to read. The ripples of that accomplishment are quite far reaching, in my life at least. On top of that he is part of a large crowd of authors who taught me to write. Every time I learn something new about what makes good writing, I see it in my favorite authors. "Show don't tell" my teachers say over and over. I think of Brian Jacques sitting (as I always imagine him) in an orchard not unlike the one inside the walls of Redwall abby, with a small crowd of blind children sitting around him. He tells them stories and makes them see what is happening. His writing is full of images, not just visual ones, although those are certainly memorable, but sounds, in the way the different creatures spoke, and tastes and smells (oh those Redwall feasts).

These beloved heros of mine, so few of them are alive now. There is a mighty generation of writers for children (most of them born in the 20s and 30s) who have been important to me. I think Susan Cooper is one of the only ones still alive.
My intellectual and imaginative grandparents have passed on, and the world seems a little less colorful.
Is it pretentious for me to want to paint it again? I just want to be one of them.

Friendly neighborhood feminist.

One summer in junior high, my best friend and her family took me on a family retreat. We all pitched tents in the back yard of one families cabin by a little river. I, being almost remarkably uninterested in boys at the age of 13, listened in discomfort as some of the other girls my age (and younger) discussed the relative merits of the young men present at the retreat. Not their characters, mind you, but their bodies. They waited anxiously for one particular young man to go swimming, almost giddy at the prospect of seeing him without a shirt. I wanted no part in this voyeurism. I felt bad for the poor guy. It seemed so degrading for him to be the object of their obsession. When the great event finally occurred, I refused to give the girls my camera, so they took someone else’s and spent the afternoon trying to snap pictures of the fellow’s glorious chest. Call me a prude; I stayed in our tent and played cards.

My friend at Bad Catholic has recently posted This about the ongoing stupidity of some feminists. Specifically, he was pocking fun at a group of them for walking topless through the streets of a city and being surprised and horrified when men took pictures. I laughed along through most of the post, but one paragraph ruffled my feminist feathers a little. “Woman has been historically more moral than man” he writes. This always bothers me. Women have, historically, been idealized as much as they have been oppressed. Victorian prudery (which was the last straw that tipped the feminist movement into action) promoted the idea that women are inherently more virtuous then men. They don’t have sexual desires, therefore, no sexual temptations. They are naturally submissive, refined, gentle, able to subdue, civilize, and please their husbands.

The feminist saw this over-awed worship of women that some men offered as another form of oppression. This idea of natural goodness was one more way that men could say “we are Human, women are Other.” They realized that as soon as a women proves herself to be less than the angle of the house, the disillusioned man feels like he’s been cheated. He didn’t get a proper woman after all. The expectations are unfair. To liberate women from these unrealistic expectations, and to free men from this illusion, feminists started portraying the virtuous girl as unattractive.  The “good girl” is perceived as stuck up, unsympathetic to human weakness, and ultimately a hypocrite. The good girl is a fake. The problem is that the feminists, as they often do, threw out the baby with the bath water. Instead of asserting their moral equality with men, they asserted their immoral equality, which is what Marcs post was about.

The girls who sat around waiting for somebody’s oldest son to take off his shirt are not unlike those men photographing a parade of topless women. You can claim that men can go topless because they have less to cover (duh).  But I can actually see where the feminists are coming from. Men need to practice modesty too, in consideration for women who (despite popular, or unpopular belief) are actually prone to temptation in the presence of a half dressed man. But this is a side issue.

I know many women who work very hard to keep themselves pure, mind, body and soul. If you promote the lie of the naturally virtuous women of the Victorian era, you are disregarding the heroism of these women who truly live the virtues of modesty and chastity. That “good girl” in pop culture is mocked because people believe that either she is lying (say the feminists) or she is somehow naturally good (say the Victorians). If you are lucky enough to find one, it’s not nature. It’s hard work and the grace of God. So my friend at Bad Catholic, if you have the good fortune, one day, to marry a woman who is more moral than you, transcends you “primitive nature” with her “primitive grace,” lifts you up and challenges you to be a more virtuous man, do her the honor of acknowledging that she can do that because she has been working with God to lift herself out of her sinful nature, just like you have.